The trip to Charlotte was JUST about the wedding 🙂 We also got to see a new city and explore a little. With two nights in a hotel and a whole day before the wedding on Saturday, it was a beautiful day for walking around in cutesy, greenified, friendly Charlotte.
We arrived Friday night for a meet n’ greet at Champions in the hotel bar area. The entire upper level was full of happy wedding guests. Maggie wore a cute, short white dress and hot pink stilettos! She was adorable of course, both she and Ben buzzing around to meet everyone.
After a fun but early night, we were up for some exploring on Saturday. To my surprise and delight, there was a marathon going on right outside of our hotel room! Oh to be a spectator! It wasn’t quite as fun as I’d hoped because the marathon was rather sparse but I still did some cheering. I believe we caught them around mile 16 or 17 so they were going pretty hard.
We then walked around to an age old cemetery to see the graves of men and women dead some since the early 1800s! It’s such a creepy feeling walking around a cemetery, thinking about these souls who lived more than one hundred years before I was even born. The crumbling graves were a reminder of our short-lived mortality and made me shudder bit.
But then it was on to more fun stuff — like sculptures and fountains and statues and buildings and most fun — bars. They had a really nice-looking little section of town full of fun little bars. My favorite was a neat looking one called “Prohibition.” It looked like you had to have a secret code to get in!
We met Michelle and her boyfriend for brunch at an organic, fresh food place called Harvest Moon. We all agreed they served the absolute best bacon we had ever had. We even asked how they made it — apparently, apple juice is the secret ingredient! It was smoked in apple juice, salt, pepper in vinegar. The smoky flavor combined with the sweet crunchiness in the bacon was to die for.
After eating, we did a little afternoon bar hopping to get in the spirit.
It was fun to chill with the guys and just have a lazy afternoon with no obligations. We actually ended up talking about our blogs quite a bit. Those boys definitely have some great ideas that we should put into play! It was kind of cute hearing them talk abut how we can make our blogs better. I think both Michelle and I felt very supported by our guys hearing them talk like that!
One of Rick’s favorite things to do is to have a beer at one bar and then move on to scenery at the next…so we followed his lead but stopped to take a few photos along the way. One thing we liked in Charlotte was that it seemed so clean, cute and inviting. Lots of welcoming benches to sit on if you need a break!
I never found any cool looking signs that said “Charlotte” but I wanted to capture something that represented the town in words so here we are with this:
So long Charlotte!
